Today, we are excited to announce that podcast industry leader Midroll Media is acquiring Stitcher. We think it’s a perfect fit that together will equal much more than the sum of its parts.

For those unfamiliar, Midroll is a podcast production company and advertising network that is changing the face of digital audio. It’s a company we at Stitcher know well and have been impressed with over the years. It is the parent company of the Earwolf network and its top-ranked comedy podcasts; the Howl premium subscription service, available at howl.fm and via apps for iOS and Android; and the Midroll advertising network, representing over 200 of the world’s largest podcasts. With offices in Los Angeles and New York City, Midroll was founded in 2010 and is a wholly owned subsidiary of The E.W. Scripps Company.

We are looking forward to joining the Midroll family, combining its leadership in great audio storytelling and advertising with our consumer product and development expertise. We’ve got some great things in store.

For Stitcher listeners, it’s business as usual. You’ll continue to have access to the world’s best audio through our apps and we are excited about innovations we have planned for you this year. For our advertisers and content partners, we look forward to sharing an expanded portfolio of opportunities to help you reach the audiences you’re seeking. Stay tuned!

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Today we’re excited to announce that Stitcher is CarPlay enabled! We were honored to be selected by Apple as a launch partner and have been working diligently with them to complete the development process. CarPlay support is now available as an update to Stitcher in the App Store – you can download it here or on your iOS device.

CarPlay is supported currently in some Pioneer aftermarket stereos (and in new Ferraris if you are lucky enough to have purchased one recently) and is coming soon to a variety of new cars – you can learn more about it and see which auto manufacturers have committed to delivering CarPlay on the Apple website here. It’s easy to use and will feel very familiar to any iOS user (and Stitcher listener!).

Adding CarPlay to our supported platforms, which include over 50 models from Ford, GM, BMW, MINI, Jaguar, Land Rover, Mazda, Volvo and more, is a big step in our automotive integration plans and we hope you’ll be able to give it a spin soon in your CarPlay enabled vehicle!

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We’ve got big news! Today, we’re excited to announce that Stitcher is now part of the Deezer umbrella. With 16 million monthly users in over 180 different countries, Deezer is the first truly worldwide music streaming service, and has been reinventing the way people discover music with the largest music catalogue in the world.

Don’t worry, we’re not going anywhere. You will still be able to use Stitcher the way you always have – on mobile phones, tablets, and in cars. Becoming part of Deezer is an incredible opportunity for us to scale our mission and bring amazing radio shows and podcasts to even more people across the globe.

We’ve come a long way. When Stitcher first started, the future of radio in the new digital world was hazy at best. The iPhone didn’t even exist, not to mention Android! But we saw a big opportunity to build an easy to use platform for podcast and radio lovers to listen to their favorite shows anytime, anywhere, on their mobile devices. Now 7 years later, we carry over 35,000 shows from 40 countries, have partnered with the greatest hosts, producers and storytellers on the planet, are present in more than 50 car models, and have been downloaded by over 13 million listeners. Even so, we believe we’re just at the dawn of a Golden Age of on-demand spoken audio.

We will continue to keep doing what we do best under the Deezer umbrella, and eventually provide even better listening experiences across the globe, combining music and talk. We’re extremely excited about this new adventure, and hope you are too.

Thank you for supporting us on our journey to this important milestone!

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Earlier this year we re-envisioned the way listeners discover and consume audio content with our new iOS Front Page. We’ve spent time testing and iterating and are now excited to introduce to you a new version of our feed. The Front Page is essentially your personalized audio feed – new episodes from your favorite shows, recommendations, headline news and highlight clips from great episodes.

The ability to discover new shows has long been one of the reasons we hear about why people love Stitcher so we focused on making it even easier with this new version. We also wanted to make something simple, personalized and delightful to use – we’re looking forward to your feedback. The Front Page is the default screen you see when starting and is also accessible from the left pane menu icon. Each episode in the Front Page is algorithmically selected just for you, using our knowledge of your listening behavior and hundreds of millions of listening hours across our entire audience. Here’s a few tips to help you get started:

Tapping on the episode reveals more information about it and gives you access to additional actions such as info and listen later buttons

Info Button: opens the show page to be able to access previous episodes of that show

Listen Later: Saves the episode to your listen later playlist

At the top of your Front Page is a toggle which lets you view just news headlines, similar to the previous version of the Front Page

Take it for a spin and let us know what you think at feedback@stitcher.com. We’re already working on more improvements so stay tuned. Thanks for listening! The Stitcher Team

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Today we released an update to our iOS app – available now in the App Store. Here’s a brief rundown of what’s new:

Front Page Headlines – by popular demand we added the ability to filter your Front Page to view just the short news headlines, similar to previous versions of the app. We’ve also more than doubled the number of daily headlines. We actually added this filter in our last release but just want to make sure to you know about it.

Download the latest version via the App Store today! Have a feature you’d like to have in Stitcher or problem you’d like to see fixed.
Email us anytime at feedback@stitcher.com or send us feedback directly from within the app via Settings>Help.

Thanks for listening,

The Stitcher Team

Jun18

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One of our primary goals at Stitcher is to be the best audio platform in the world for our content partners to have their audience enjoy the news, sports, entertainment and talk shows that they create. As part of this goal we are excited to announce our new expanded revenue share program, available to all of our partners.

We want Stitcher to be the number one platform podcasters choose to have their audience hear their content. We highly value this partnership and believe it’s important to help move the industry forward by sharing our revenue with the content providers as we begin to monetize the service. To our knowledge, we are the only listening platform that has taken this step.

In order to qualify for revenue share, content partners must have a minimum of 5,000 active listeners on Stitcher in a calendar month. Over time, we hope to be able to expand this program to even more content partners but as a small company with limited resources, we think it’s a good place to start.

If you are already a content partner with a show on Stitcher and want to learn more about our revenue share, please visit our Partner FAQ by logging into the Stitcher Partner Portal (http://partners.stitcher.com) where you will find answers to common questions you may have.

We are excited to open this opportunity to our partners and truly value the amazing work they do to bring high quality listening to Stitcher. Here’s to continuing to help grow this industry in the coming months and years.

-The Stitcher Team

To qualify, a partner must have 5,000 or more active listeners a month on Stitcher.

Active listeners are defined as listener who play more than 30 seconds of a piece of audio and have listened in the current calendar month.

Jun05

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As you may have noticed, the amount and frequency of advertising on Stitcher has increased in recent weeks. Advertising is an integral part of our business model, enabling us to continue to provide the Stitcher service for free, however I wanted to acknowledge some growing pains as we’ve rolled this out and offer my sincere apologies.

The good news is there is rapidly growing interest from advertisers looking to reach Stitcher listeners. This in turn has required us to accelerate our learning around the best way to deliver this advertising and preserve the listening experience you’ve come to expect from Stitcher.

Among the many things we have developed at Stitcher is a technology for delivering advertising throughout our app. As the advertising volume in the past weeks has increased, we have seen instances of our ad system performing in unexpected and sometimes suboptimal ways, for example by delivering ads at less than ideal times, serving repetitive ads, and other issues. As a result, we have committed to partner with Google for all our ad serving moving forward. They are the leader in the space, and integrating their technology will be a major step forward to alleviate many of these issues. It will take us a bit of time to complete this integration, but it is a top priority for us to ensure we bring you the very best experience possible on Stitcher. Thank you in advance for your patience and understanding as we make the transition.

We’ve also been listening to your feedback on Stitcher Plus – obviously some of you have already chosen that option for enjoying ad free listening on Stitcher. Keep the feedback coming and it’s possible we will be evolving the Stitcher Plus offering in the coming months as well. This option is currently available on iOS and we are actively evaluating how we can bring to Android – stay tuned.

Finally, we want to make you aware that we share our revenue with our content partners and to our knowledge, we are the only service doing so. We recently expanded the program to include more of our content partners. We will continue to grow this revenue sharing program as we grow. You should know that by listening on Stitcher you’re also supporting the content producers themselves. We’re dedicated to growing this industry for everyone.

Again, our apologies for the bumpy transition. We appreciate your candid feedback and will continue to work to find the right balance for advertising.
Thanks for listening!

Noah Shanok

Co-founder & CEO

Jun02

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We’re excited to announce the launch of a first ever Listen Later feature that revolutionizes the personal playlist by enabling web-surfers to shift the spoken word audio content and podcast episodes that they discover online to their mobile phones and to times when listening is more convenient for them.

What is Listen Later?
It’s like Pocket or Instapaper but for audio. Through an embeddable button added by websites, the new Listen Later feature enables visitors to the sites of radio producers like Science Friday or FOX News Radio to save episodes of their popular shows and the audio portions of articles to their Listen Later playlists on Stitcher.

Why is Listen Later Needed for Audio Listening?
Since launching Listen Later inside of Stitcher’s mobile apps earlier this year, we’ve seen large numbers of listeners save interesting episodes so that they can shift their listening to times that work better for them – like their commute. People’s browsing often happens at different times than their listening and without a save for later feature, many would-be listeners choose not to listen at all.

Where Can Listeners Find Listen Later Buttons?
Listen Later is already integrated into many popular websites. Also available today, Listen Later is integrated throughout Stitcher’s own website allowing anyone to begin building a Listen Later playlist based on the stories they discover there.

Who’s Partnering with us at Launch?
The feature is live as of 9am EST this morning, so if you’re interested we encourage you to check it out. You can see it on sites like:

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The magic of 25,000+ voices just got a little easier to wield with the latest Stitcher release for Android. There are novel features for both new and long time listeners to adjust to and master. We’ve placed a few tips within the app for new users and those who are upgrading and wanted to provide a little more detail here on how to get the best out of Stitcher and out of your podcasts.

1. Using the new Menu

The new left-drawer menu streamlines access to all of your content – the Front Page, your playlists, Browse Shows and Listen Later – from anywhere in the app*.

> Tip: Simply place your thumb on the far left side of your screen (all the way to the edge) and swipe right.

* If you are navigating within the player, you must first close the player by tapping the “X” in the top left corner before you can swipe right to access the menu.

2. Player & Mini Player

Stitcher is built on the core principle that we want you to be able to have two seamless experiences: playing your podcasts and discovering new shows. With the player & mini player we’ve made it possible to always be able to access the episode that is playing and the player controls from anywhere in the app. Whenever something is playing, it will appear in the mini player.

> Tip: Expanding the full player grants you access to more details about the episode, previous episodes, and extended player controls.

3. Browse Shows

Looking for new shows or types of podcasts to listen to? Dive into Stitcher’s endless audio content and find exactly what you’re looking for in Browse Shows. As we work towards a more visually unified application, we did something recently that we’re really proud of: we redesigned our category lists within Browse Shows – check them out and let us know what you think!

> Tip: Access browse shows from the left drawer menu, tap into a station until you see a list of episodes. From the list of episodes, you can tap on the settings menu in the top right corner of the episode to add it directly to your Listen Later playlist.

4. Building a Playlist

With Stitcher, you can save all of your favorite shows to playlists to keep them organized and easily accessible. Your playlists consist of the most recent episode of every show you save – so you’re always up-to-date. Get started by accessing the show page of any podcast you’re interested in by tapping the “Info” button, then select the “+” button adjacent the show name to add it to your playlist.

- To edit your playlist, first open it, then tap the three bar settings icon in the top right of the playlist. From here you can edit the order, delete shows, rename your playlist, or access offline listening settings.

> Tip: Open your playlist and tap the three bar settings icon on the first show. From here, you can directly play that episode and it will play through your entire playlist – skipping over the episodes you’ve already heard.

5. Listen Later

Listen Later lets you save individual episodes to a playlist on the go! Whenever you’re browsing and you see an episode you want to check out at a later time, simply add it to your Listen Later playlist which you can access from the new drawer menu. Here are a few pointers:

- You can add a an episode to your listen later playlist virtually anywhere, from the show page or by tapping the menu icon that appears to the right of the item.

- After you play an item in the Listen Later playlist it automatically gets archived to the bottom of the list.

- Remove episodes by tapping the settings menu to the right of the list item.

> Tip: Set your Listen Later playlist to be available offline, that way, you can add episodes directly to the list and wherever you are you’ll be able to access the episodes you want to listen to!

6. Offline Listening

You can download all of the episodes in your playlists to listen offline when you are out of network or can’t connect to Wi-Fi. Depending on your settings, whenever Stitcher refreshes it will make sure your playlists are up-to-date by automatically downloading the most recent episode of each given show in that playlist.

> Tips: Open the playlist you want to make available offline and simply flip the toggle to “ON.”

Dear Stitcher Listeners, Mom, Dad and the general public: sleep timer for android is finally here! For all those of you who enjoy a soothing and entertaining way to fall asleep at night, you can ensure you don’t miss too much of your show with the sleep timer.

> Tip: Play any show, expand the player, tap the up arrows in the middle of the control bar – then select the amount of time before you want Stitcher to pause. Sweet dreams!